Almost every mobile communication device (e.g., cell phone, PDA, etc.) provides an address book whose entries include several attributes for storing contact information, e.g., name, mobile number, home number, address, date of birth, picture, etc. In most cases however, only some subset of these attributes are utilized, such as a name and phone number. Populating other attributes is a time consuming and error prone manual process.
Currently, standards exist for storing such contact information. One such standard, commonly referred to as vCard, is described, e.g., at http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/NOTE-vcard-rdf-20010222. Described therein is a Resource Description Framework (RDF) for encoding a vCard profile defined by RFC 2426 and to provide equivalent functionality to its standard format. This note describes a structure to enable the common and consistent description of persons (using the existing semantics of vCard) and to encode these in RDF/XML.
Various approaches to implementing an automated process have been considered, but such solutions involve synchronization in a push mode. For instance, EP Patent application EP 1 826 998 A1, “Method to accomplish download of contacts into a phonebook of a telephone,” published on Aug. 29, 2007, which is hereby incorporated by reference, describes a first device pushing data to a set of frequently called second devices. This solution however fails to directly solve the problem of obtaining address information at a user's own device.
Accordingly, a need exists for a system and method that can better automated mobile address population.